By Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Daykeeping proposes a variable measure of our days. In compositions that resemble the writer’s journal, DuPlessis deploys a full range of literary techniques—concrete poems, the sonnet, erasure, found texts, polemic, and meditation—to lay out a new calculus embracing personal experience and social fact. Poems mark time and crest with the ebb and flow of attention. Poems enact or etch the oscillation of any given day’s shrinking or expansion, distillation, and dispersion. Poems call out time theft—the attention held hostage to distraction and threadbare politics. I read and track poem’s visible efforts to slow up the speed of words appearing on the page. I am shaken awake by ubiquitous “u”s in a cluster of words, andby the scatter of alterations somersaulting in “loose,” “Lose,” “leaders,” “loss,” and “less.” Here is a poetry that agitates to restore the “under-seen” and “under-scene” to partial view. Read this book and begin to reclaim the matters that have escaped attention, care, and undammed (undimmed) thought.

—Erica Hunt